A bitcoin.com founder has sold all his bitcoin, as it's 'as good as useless'

Bitcoin.com is one of the world's largest bitcoin sites, having grown its profile thanks to the insane price surge of the cryptocurrency this year. But its co-founder and CTO, Emil Oldenburg, a Swedish native, is extremely skeptical of bitcoin's future.

"I would say an investment in bitcoin is right now the riskiest investment you can make. There's an extremely high risk," he says in an interview with Swedish tech site Breakit:

"I have in fact sold all my bitcoins recently and switched to bitcoin cash," says Oldenburg, referring to the problems with bitcoin's high transaction costs and lead times.

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Indeed, by some counts, bitcoin transaction fees are doubling every three months, and it now takes on average 4.5 hours to confirm a bitcoin transaction. Ars Technica reported that fees reached $US26 ($34) per trade recently. Bitcoin.com operates in everything that has to do with bitcoins. ...

The reason why people haven't understood the risks inherent in owning bitcoins, according to Oldenburg, is simply because most have so far only bought the cryptocurrency — but never sold or traded with them. "As soon as people realise that this is how it works, they will start to sell," he tells Breakit.

"The old bitcoin network is as good as unusable."

While buying, selling or trading in bitcoins is not an issue today, according to Oldenburg, the problems surface when bitcoin transactions are recorded on the blockchain, the digital ledger that records each transaction.

The problem centres on the limited amount of transactions per second you can make in the bitcoin network, which in turn depends on the formation of the memory "block size" that store the transactions. This, according to Oldenburg, makes for a very illiquid and unusable cryptocurrency. ...